30 May 2008

Exopolis Online Ads

(If you poke around long enough you might find a few little bugs, but it's mostly done.)

This is (obviously) a promotional piece for our banner ad capabilities. Doing the project in Flex made a lot of things easier: transitions, placement, deep-linking, back/forward button capabilities.

It's a bit risky loading banners directly into Flash, but fortunately Flex's AVM1Movie component largely keeps the banner functionality in its own "sandbox" (with a few exceptions that need tending to). Flash banner ads have some of the hackiest programming you'll ever care to see, but fortunately AVM1Movie prevents 99% of it from affecting the rest of the site.

I did get one nice, reuseable thing out of it, too: the MouseScrollCanvas component that controls those scrolling lists of links.

Which reminds me ... I really have to consolidate all the reuseable code I've written someday and release it....